Have You Read the World's Funniest Joke Book? The Frog Jokebooks as Interaction Strategy

Abstract

For three decades, David Miller, a sometime homeless street person and full time local celebrity known only as "Frog" has been peddling his Jokebooks in Eugene Oregon. Today his oeuvre consists of 88 booklets filled with riddle jokes, narrative jokes, original cartoons, purloined cartoons, and other hilarities. Despite a serious (sic) effort by the city fathers to stop him by enforcing anti-peddling laws, Frog is still a fixture on the Eugene street scene. This paper will attempt a content analysis of the joke books, which I view as latter-day broadsides.